FIRST, A THANKS to all however many or few of you listened to my bit Sunday afternoon on “The Buzz 100.7 FM.” The next aural MISCevent will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
TO USE A WORD popularized by a certain singer-songwriter on a certain record label, imagine.
Imagine a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents; that held the original copyright to the “His Master’s Voice” logo.
Imagine a company that, before WWII, virtually controlled the record business in the Eastern Hemisphere. A company that could rightly proclaim itself “The Greatest Recording Organisation in the World.”
Imagine a company whose labs helped develop the technology of television as we still know it, equipped the world’s first regularly-scheduled TV station, and later controlled the production company that brought us Benny Hill and Danger Mouse.
Imagine a company that, by acquiring Capitol Records, attained the legacies of Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and the Beach Boys.
Imagine a company that had the Beatles.
Now, imagine a company that squandered that vast advantage, via questionable investments in military electronics, movie theaters, real estate, TV-furniture rental shops, and an almost singlehanded drive to keep the British filmmaking industry alive (noble but fiscally ill-advised).
And so, after a decade of spinoffs and de-conglomeratizations and downsizings, it’s time for us all to use the words of a certain other singer-songwriter and say “EMI–Goodbye.”
What’s currently left of the EMI Music Group will be folded into a joint venture with the worldwide music assets of Time Warner, which is itself being acquired by America Online.
On the one hand, this means the end of the EMI/Capitol operation as a stand-alone entity.
On the other hand, it means AOL’s taken its first step at whittling away Time Warner’s media holdings; something I’d predicted a month ago. The new music operation would be much larger then TW’s current Warner Music Group, but would only be half owned by AOL/TW. AOL could easily siphon off additional pecentages, like TW used to do with its movie unit.
On the other other hand, it’s another milestone down the seemingly unending path of big-media consolidations. In the music business, that means six companies that once controlled an estimated 85 percent of all recorded-music sales are now down to four: Sony, AOL/TW/EMI, Seagram/Universal, and Bertlesmann/BMG. (Only Time Warner had been U.S.-owned; and now its record biz will be half-British owned.)
Despite the vast mainstream-media hurrahs over the AOL-TW merger (and this subsequent deal) as some bold new step toward the wired age, and the accompanying alternative-media bashing of what are perceived as ever more powerful culture trusts, we’ve got about as many major local/national media outlets as ever, some of which have broader product lines and which are, in practicality, no more or less politically center-right than they ever were.
What’s more, these companies often find their new wholes to be worth not much more than the sums of their former parts, even after the usual massive layoffs. The Warner Music Group had already been oozing sales and market share; one article put part of the reason on its decreasing ability to force the whole world to love its Anglophone superstars: “Warner has historically relied on distributing American acts around the world, but many overseas audiences are starting to prefer homegrown acts.”
The oft-hyped “synergy” among these under-one-roof media brands has never really worked out, and probably never will to any great extent. (Music historians may remember that the old CBS Records issued Bob Dylan’s antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” but CBS Television wouldn’t let him sing it on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
What the conglomerooneys can, and do, do is raise the stakes of entry–for their own kinds of stuff. You want to break out a choreographed, cattle-call-auditioned “boy band”? Better have a huge video budget, lots of gossip-magazine editor friends, good dealings with the N2K tour-promotion people, and the clout to tell MTV they won’t get an exclusive on your already-established “girl band” unless they also play your new “boy band.”
But if you’ve got a street-credible lady or gent who writes and sings honest stuff about honest emotions, you can still establish this act far better under indie-label means than via the majors.
Indeed, as certain acts I know who’ve been chewed up and spit out by the majors tell me, the behemoths get more incompetent every year at promoting or marketing anything. That may be why they’re devoting more and more effort to only the most easily marketed acts, and increasingly leaving the rest of the creative spectrum for the rest of us to discover on our own.
TOMORROW: The future of Utopias.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here are the Canadian government’s proposed graphic cigarette warning messages. The problem with these, as other commentators have already noted, is that teens will likely adore the gruesome death-imagery and hence smoke more. Just as the Philip Morris-funded antismoking commercials in the U.S. depict nonsmoking teens as hopeless geeks….
